Effects of Driving Mode on the Performance of Multiple-Chamber Piezoelectric Pumps with Multiple Actuators

Due to the limited output capability of piezoelectric diaphragm pumps, the driving voltage is frequently increased to obtain the desired output. However, the excessive voltage application may lead to a large deformation in the piezoelectric ceramics, which could cause it to breakdown or become damaged. Therefore, increasing the number of chambers to obtain the desired output is proposed. Using a check-valve quintuple-chamber pump with quintuple piezoelectric actuators, the characteristics of the pump under different driving modes are investigated through experiments. By changing the number and connection mode of working actuators, pump performances in terms of flow rate and backpressure are tested at a voltage of 150 V with a frequency range of 60 Hz -400 Hz. Experiment results indicate that the properties of the multiple-chamber pump change significantly with distinct working chambers even though the number of pumping chambers is the same. Pump performance declines as the distance between the working actuators increases. Moreover, pump performance declines dramatically when the working piezoelectric actuator closest to the outlet is involved. The maximum backpressures of the pump with triple, quadruple, and quintuple actuators are increased by 39%, 83%, and 128%, respectively, compared with the pump with double working actuators; the corresponding maximum flow rates of the pumps are simply increased by 25.9%, 49.2%, and 67.8%, respectively. The proposed research offers practical guidance for the effective utilization of the multiple-chamber pumps under different driving modes.

On Dynamic Channel Emulation in Sector MPAC for Over-the-Air Testing of Beamformed Massive MIMO Devices

In this article,novel emulation strategies for the sectored multiple probe anechoic chamber(SMPAC)are proposed to enable the reliable evaluation of the massive multiple-input multiple-output(MIMO)device operating at beamforming mode,which requires a realistic non-stationary channel environment.For the dynamic propagation emulation,an efficient closed-form probe weighting strategy minimizing the power angular spectrum(PAS)emulation errors is derived,substantially reducing the associated computational complexity.On the other hand,a novel probe selection algorithm is proposed to reproduce a more accurate fading environment.Various standard channel models and setup configurations are comprehensively simulated to validate the capacity of the proposed methods.The simulation results show that more competent active probes are selected with the proposed method compared to the conventional algorithms.Furthermore,the derived closedform probe weighting strategy offers identical accuracy to that obtained with complicated numerical optimization.Moreover,a realistic dynamic channel measured in an indoor environment is reconstructed with the developed methodologies,and 95.6%PAS similarity can be achieved with 6 active probes.The satisfactory results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are suitable for arbitrary channel emulation.